Using THE Dream Machine 2’s decorative stitches to embellish placemats

Have you chosen one (or more) of the 5 different settings to turn orphan blocks into placemat tops I showed you yesterday? Your orphan blocks can be any size, these 5 possibilities can work wonders. Today I’m using some of the decorative stitches on THE Dream Machine 2 to embellish any of the placemat settings.

I selected two of the simpler placemats that I made yesterday and layered them both with batting and backings. I used my Odif 505 spray to stick all of the layers together.

THE Dream Machine 2 from Brother comes with a mind-blowing 726 decorative stitches!! Here’s the Character Decorative Stitch menu. As you can see it is sub-divided into 6 different groups along with the different lettering that can be stitched with the machine.

Here are some of the stitches available in Menu 7 of THE Dream Machine 2’s Character Decorative stitches. I threaded the machine with a blue and white variegated thread and then scrolled though the menu until I found a few stitches that I wanted to try out.

I selected one of the decorative stitches from the menu. I then used fabric marker to draw lines across the top of my first placemat and followed these lines with the machine.

I then selected a second stitch and followed a second line and kept repeating until I had stitched down all of the drawn lines. The laser pointer on THE Dream Machine 2 is really useful for following the guide lines drawn on the placemat.

Here are a few of the different stitches that I tried on the first placemat. I really like swirl one that is shown going from right to left in the picture!

I was a bit surprised when I started stitching #6-273 with THE Dream Machine 2! I couldn’t believe how big it was compared to the other stitches!

Then I had another look at the screen and realized that my chosen stitch was shown at only 25% of the actual size!! No wonder it was huge! So now I know to look at that percentage BEFORE stitching. This would be an AWESOME stitch to use in a narrow border!

I then switched to my second placemat and changed my thread to a variegated purple. I tried out a few more of the character decorative stitches and found some that I really liked.

The back of the placemat shows how the decorative stitches sewn with THE Dream Machine 2 also served to quilt the layers together.

Using some of the decorative stitches on THE Dream Machine 2 to embellish AND quilt these placemats sure was fun!! You could take DAYS to stitch out all of the decorative stitches that are available on this machine!

Tomorrow I’m using another feature of this great machine for embellishing – the couching foot!! It’s sure to be exciting – see you then!